CEO turnover is big right now

More than 1,400 CEOs have left their jobs from January to September this year. That’s up by almost 50% from the same period last year, and it’s the biggest turnover in more than two decades, according to a monthly report from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas. The C-suite is having its own —albeit delayed — Great Resignation.

A theme has been popping up in conversations that Ash Athawale, a senior managing director at executive recruiting firm Robert Half, has been having with CEOs: “‘I’ve done this. I want to take time off and I want to go do something else.'”

For some leaders, ”doing something else” means taking on a less intense role at a nonprofit, he said. For others, it means retirement.

“You take your entire company through a global pandemic, you’re exhausted,” Athawale said.

Yes, CEOs face burnout too. And a lot of them have been in their roles longer than they ever expected, noted Yo-Jud Cheng, a professor of business administration at the University of Virginia.

“The COVID era was kind of a survival period for a lot of companies. A lot of them kinda chose to stay the course with the CEOs that they had. They thought dealing with COVID wasn’t the time to go through a major leadership transition,” Cheng said.

Now that the pandemic’s dust has settled, more companies are shaking things up at the top. They’re ready to find a new leader who’s more prepared to address how the world has changed. And when a bunch of companies make that move all at the same time, Cheng said it causes a ripple effect of CEOs retiring — or being poached.

“Because when you think about a CEO labor market, it’s really not a huge pool of candidates oftentimes, and so any movement at one firm can have implications for all different firms within the economy,” she said.

Now, some of this churn is normal. Many CEOs are baby boomers after all, remarked Andy Challenger at Challenger, Gray and Christmas. And a flurry of retirements doesn’t necessarily signal something bad happening in the economy; in fact, it might be the opposite. 

“In some ways it’s a signal that maybe there is a little certainty that has entered the situation,” he said. “And it makes boards and company owners more comfortable changing out that top role.”

In other words CEO turnover may be one sign that the economy is stabilizing.